Following the untimely death of director and actor Liu Chia Liang, Anne
Billson pays tribute to a golden age of martial arts films.

The death in June of Liu Chia Liang, after a two decade battle against cancer, seems to have gone virtually unnoticed by the mainstream media, which is a shame because he was only one of the best action directors and choreographers who ever lived. His work deserves to be celebrated – especially now, as a corrective to modern Hollywood's unfortunate tendency to create action by chopping it into little pieces in the editing room rather than staging it in longer takes in front of the camera.

Along with Chang Cheh (who died in 2002), Liu Chia Liang was one of the most prominent directors during the heyday of Shaw Brothers studios, and a exponent of the popular Hong Kong synthesis of samurai movie, spaghetti western and wuxia (Chinese stories of chivalry and martial arts). He also appeared in many of the films, and as recently as 2005 worked as stunt director and actor on Tsui Hark's Seven Swords.

He started learning kung-fu at the age of eight from his father, a martial arts master, and in 1965, at the age of 21, joined Shaw Brothers, where he began to collaborate with another director-to-be, Tang Chia, in choreographing action sequences, notably for the films of Chang Cheh. When Liu started to direct, his approach was very different from the solemn heroic bromance of Chang Cheh's work; his films contain more humour (though the combat scenes are usually deadly serious), and even have fighting roles for women.

You don't watch kung-fu films for the stories, which are usually some variation on avenging the death or defeat of a loved one or associate, and often involve elaborate training rituals in which the protagonist must hone his kung-fu skills. You watch them for the scenes of combat, which at their best can have grace and rhythm as glorious as the dance routines of Fred Astaire or the comic set-pieces of Buster Keaton. The great martial arts directors knew how to film a fight scene, with none of the excessive editing and pointless fancy camerawork you see in Hollywood action films today. The combatants and their moves are clearly visible, and despite the use of stylised sound effects and occasional use of wirework in some of the more extravagant leaps and tumbles, it's the actors themselves, often trained in Chinese opera, whose acrobatic skills are on display. It's all in the choreography, and Liu Chia Liang's choreography was the very best.

Liu's favourite leading actor was Gordon Liu, perhaps best known to western audiences these days for his appearances (as different characters) in both volumes of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. His first film for Liu Chia Liang was Dirty Ho (1976), in which he plays a prince who has to keep his kung-fu skills hidden – hence some dazzling choreography when he pretends it's not him but a female lute-player who is doing the fighting.

The character Gordon Liu played in in Kill Bill: Volume 2 was Pai Mei, a white-haired priest who had already appeared as an out-and-out villain in Liu Chia Liang's Executioners from Shaolin (1977), where he was played by perennial bad guy actor Lo Lieh. Pai Mei's party-piece is the ability to retract his testicles into his groin, making him all but invincible in combat.

Gordon Liu's next film with Liu Chia Liang was a kung-fu classic, became the actor's signature role, and incidentally inspired American hip-hoppers the Wu-Tang Clan. In The 36th Chamber of Shaolin(1978), he plays a young student who wants to learn martial arts at the Shaolin temple so he can avenge friends and family. The film is famed for its elaborate training sequences based on seemingly mundane tasks – without which we would never have had the "wax on, wax off" of The Karate Kid. Return to the 36th Chamber, the first of two sequels, followed in 1980, and is memorable for its astonishing use of bamboo scaffolding techniques in the fight scenes.

Atypically for a Liu Chia Liang film, Legendary Weapons of China(1982) incorporated supernatural elements in its story about the search for martial artists invulnerable to bullets. Liu Chia Liang (in the red) fights his real-life brother Liu Chia Yung (in the white), also a martial arts choreographer and director, and the results are spectacular. There's a list of the legendary weapons themselves on Wikipedia.

My favourite Liu Chia Liang film, Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (1984) is also atypical in that it's less humorous than that of the director's other films; the story starts with betrayal and a massacre, and it can't have lightened the mood when one of the film's stars, Alexander Fu Sheng, died in a car accident before the end of filming.

Gordon Liu, whose character survives the film's opening carnage, seeks refuge with monks whose vows forbid them to kill - so they have devised a method of defeating marauding wolves by defanging them, a technique gleefully applied to the villains in this final showdown. Warning: this clip is particularly bloody. But the bad guys have behaved so nefariously they deserve everything they get in one of Lia Chia Liang's most thrilling fight scenes.